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Thursday, February 23, 2012

The image to your left is one of a set of images that were recently posted by Vincent Hendricks, Professor of Formal Philosophy at the University of Copenhagen and part-time Visiting Research Scholar at Columbia University, advertising his course in Logic. (The advertisement has since been taken down from Prof. Hendricks' website, but you can view screenshots of the original here.) Professor Hendricks is also a member of the editorial board of Synthese, a philosophy journal specializing in epistemology and the philosophy of science, which has come under considerable scrutiny in the last year as a result of some highly-questionable editorial judgments regarding the merits and demerits of Intelligent Design arguments. (For more on the Synthese scandal, see here, here, and here.) I should say at the outset, and in the interest of full disclosure, that I do not know Professor Hendricks personally, nor am I familiar with his published work. As a rule, I try to assume that people I don't know are fundamentally well-meaning, decent and rational people. However, after seeing these photos, I'm pretty convinced that-- not to put too fine a point on it-- Professor Hendricks must havelost his mind.

You'll notice first, I hope, that in the image above Prof. Hendricks is prominently and authoritatively situated amidst a bevy of scantily-clad and thoroughly-infantilized "schoolgirls," who appear to be (from right to left) either affectlessly bored, technologically preoccupied, mysteriously vacant (possibly afraid?), and perfunctorily seductive. Behind all these good-looking girls, not incidentally, there just so happens to be some symbolic logic on the whiteboard. These photos were an advertisement for Prof. Hendricks' Logic course. I'll leave aside for the moment the many problems associated with "advertising" courses, a practice that I think unfortunately reifies the idea that learning is a commodity and, more unfortunately, reinforces the commonly held presumption that best analogue for the the teacher/student relationship is the server/consumer relationship. (My department "advertises" courses as well, though the images associated with our courses are decidedly less provocative.) In Hendricks' (semi-)defense, as he notes on his own blog, his images were originally photographed for a magazine that intended to feature him as the "Man of the Month." (Exactly which magazine that is has not yet been made clear.) I'm not sure what Hendricks' caveat means to excuse, really, since I imagine that anyone who's ever taught a Philosophy course (or taken a Philosophy course, or taught or taken ANY college course, for that matter) can easily surmise from these images that they could NOT EVER be appropriate for a syllabus or course-advertisement. Nevertheless, they were utilized as such, and the images have created a bit of a maelstrom in the professional philosophical community, as evidenced on the two most widely-read Philosophy blogs, The Leiter Reports (relevant posts here, here and here) andNewAPPS: Art, Politics, Philosophy, Science (here). Professor Hendricks' response to the backlash on those blogs, in full, is as follows:

To the Philosophical Community

A recent picture on my website has caused some debate. The intention was that the picture, as cover on a forthcoming magazine, might be used to view logic from a somewhat humorous and untraditional perspective appealing to a larger audience which the magazine covers. However it had the opposite effect offending various parties in the philosophical community. I truly apologize for this and I stand completely corrected. I have removed the pictures from the website.

Vincent F. Hendricks

Just to be clear, the "debate" that Prof. Hendricks apologizes for generating doesn't concern asingle offensive picture, but a whole set of offensive pictures. And it concerns a whole set of pictures which, although ostensibly directed at some other audience (presumably, an audience interested in what Copenhagen's "Man of the Month" looks like), were nonetheless directed at undergraduate students, both male and female. Professor Hendricks, we can only assume, consciously elected to include these images as a part of his Logic syllabus in order to appeal ("from a somewhat humorous and untraditional perspective") to a "larger audience" who might not already be convinced that philosophical Logic is appealing. Again in Prof. Hendricks' defense, we all have to admit that philosophical logic is often a hard case to sell. It's NOT an area of our discipline that generally appeals to anything like what one might call a "larger audience." So, I understand and can sympathize with the inclination to employ "somewhat humorous and untraditional" methods of appeal to draw students in logic courses.

Alas, as they say, the road to Hell is paved with good intentions.

I really want to give Professor Hendricks a fair shake here, but I also feel obligated to get the facts (in this case, the pictures) of the matter out there for your consideration first. So, you can see throughout this post the other images included in Prof. Hendricks' original advertisement for his Logic course. None of them, I hope we all can agree, mitigate the overtly sexist depiction of women in the first picture posted above-- by which I mean, all of them capitalize on the sexual objectification, infantilization, subordination, submission and de-intellectualizing of women. All of them represent Prof. Hendricks as authoritative, powerful, intellectual and autonomous-- which, of course, I think we can safely assume he is-- but Prof. Hendricks' authority, power, intellect and autonomy are represented via explicit contrast with archetypical representations of women as passive, submissive, deferential and (reductively) sexual. All three images are, in fact, pretty much standard for what in the U.S. we might consider typical Maxim fare. (I have no idea what the Danish equivalent of Maxim might be, though I presume, because I live in the real world, that there is an equivalent.) I'd like to think that any philosopher worth his or her salt would know better than consent to participation in images like these.

I would, unfortunately, be wrong.

If you want to read what working professional philosophers are saying about this whole issue, I would direct you to the links in the first paragraph above at The Leiter Reports and New APPS blogs. I've been following those conversations, and I think that most of the key critical points and counterpoints have been articulated there already. Instead of repeating what's been said about the matter, and since I seriously doubt that Prof. Hendricks himself is still reading those exchanges, I've decided instead to direct my commentary to a different audience. I'm directing this to those of you female students at the University of Copenhagen who might have been considering enrollment in Logic with Prof. Hendricks next term. What follows is the email that I think you should send to Prof. Hendricks explaining why you have decided to decline that option. Feel free to copy-and-paste it verbatim, or to make whatever editorial amendments you wish. For what it's worth, I think that male students at the University of Copenhagen could/should send something like this, too, although that would definitely require some editing.

Dear Professor Hendricks,

I recently saw the advertisement for your 2012 Logikkursus. Before seeing it, I considered enrolling in the course, as I understand philosophical Logic to be (like mathematics and physics) one of the core disciplines through which we come to understand the fundamental truths of our shared world. I find it especially curious that you would post an advertisement utilizing images that preemptively undermines the intellectual merit of more than half of the possible students in your course. So, I am writing now to inform you that, because of your advertisement, I will not enroll in your Logikkursus.

I assume you are aware that the images you posted in your advertisement were manifestly and overtly sexist. Those images simultaneously objectified, infantilized, depersonalized and dehumanized the women depicted in them. Although I am aware that such images are standard fare in the larger world of advertisements, I am deeply disappointed to see you appropriate them so uncritically.

I assume you are also aware that the profession of Philosophy is grossly underrepresented by women. Less than 1 in 5 tenure or tenure-track professional Philosophers are female. If you wonder why students like myself-- i.e., female undergraduates interested in Philosophy-- depart from the discipline in statistically significant numbers, I suggest that you take a critical look at your course advertisement.

I take from the apology that you posted on your blog that you understand your chief offense to have been employing (in your words) " a humorous and untraditional perspective." Let me be clear: the perspective depicted in your course advertisement was unambiguously sexist, which is neither humorous nor untraditional.

I would congratulate you for your achievement of Copenhagen's "Man of the Month" designation if I did not at the same time regret so deeply that you congratulate yourself for the same. Because you have authorized the representation of that honorific in the most traditional (and non-humorous) manner possible, I find myself deeply suspect of your capacity to teach me the basic skills of critical thinking. You elected to extend that representation into the Academy, a world in which it should be (and is) most roundly criticized. I can only see in that decision a deeply flawed capacity for illuminating the shared truths of our world.

If you find yourself so inclined, I would be interested to hear your understanding of the issue upon which you "stand completely corrected." In the meantime, I am and remain personally insulted by your Logic course advertisement.

Saturday, February 04, 2012

Late last semester, as a part of my department's semi-regular Philosophy Film Series, we screened Mechanical Love, a 2007 documentary about the ever-evolving relationships between humans and robots. The film focuses chiefly on two robot projects, both from Japan: (1) IRC's (Intelligent Robots and Communication Laboratories) Geminoid Project, which manufactures very human-like androids, and (2) AIST's (Advanced Science and Technology) project that created Paro the "therapeutic robot." Both Paro and the Geminoids fall under the general category of "social robots," which are designed to mimic human interactive social behaviors and which, the film suggests, might even come to replace other humans for our social relationship needs. I've discussed the Geminoid Project in this series already, so I want to focus more on Paro here. As you can see from the picture above, Paro takes the form of a plush baby seal and is programmed to respond (positively and negatively) to human touch and voice. Paro isn't meant to actually "replace" a human being so much as it is meant to replace a non-human animal, like a pet. (For many people, of course, relationships with their pets already replace or mimic relationships with real human beings. More on that below.) If the depictions that we see in the film Mechanical Love are true, Paro is very good at doing what it was designed to do. So good, in fact, that Paro seems.... well, uncanny.

Interestingly, the design plan for Paro indicates that the roboticists behind it made a concerted effort to avoid the uncanny valley phenomenon that I've been discussing in this series so far. In the film, we're told that Paro's general size and weight is meant to approximate the feel of a small child. Also like a small child, Paro can't speak, so it cant and isn't meant to generate complex or sophisticated interactions, like a conversation partner. Paro needs its owner to "care" for it (by stroking and petting), respond to it when it "cries," and also to "feed" it (by plugging it in periodically). That is to say, Paro is designed to be dependent in the way a small child is, and also to make its owner feel indispensable and necessary, like I imagine the parent of a small child feels. Unlike scientists at the Geminoid Project, however, the AIST designers didn't want to produce a robot-version of a small child, but rather a robot-version of a non-human animal pet that also happens to be the size of a small child. No offense to all the parents out there, but I think AIST's fundamental intuition is right, namely, that the similarities between our relationships with pets and our relationships with small children, even if not identical, is remarkably similar. The dependency of pets and small children on us fosters a particularly strong relational bond, if only because that dependency forces us to respond, and to be responsible, to them.

So, why not a small cat or dog? As it turns out, the original design of Paro was in the form of a small cat, but that form was rejected by almost all of its test "owners." The reason for this, the Paro designers explain, is because most people are familiar enough with the look, feel, sound and behaviors of real cats to be immediately turned-off by the robot cat's imperfect approximation. (That "imperfect approximation" is, as I have contended in this series, the root of the cause of the uncanny valley effect.) When the designers switched to a form that was equally cute but not nearly as familiar (the baby seal), Paro's uncanny problems disappeared. In this way, I think Paro accomplishes the same effect as Speilberg's creature E.T. and does so by many of the same strategies. Paro's designers were correct that most people have no idea what the up-close-and-personal interactions with baby seals are like-- and, with a few highly improbable exceptions, nobody knows what the up-close-and-personal interactions with extra-terrestrials are like-- so choosing the form of an unfamiliar-animal or an unfamiliar-being to serve as the host for very-familiar interactions and behaviors gives designers quite a bit of latitude. What Paro's creators needed to capture, like Speilberg, was the essence of what makes these creatures the sort that enable relationships. It turns out that the basic characteristics needed to manufacture that effect are simple and few: big eyes, small stature, minimal capacity for communication, some element of dependency, complete lack of malice or aggressiveness, and a rudimentary simulation of the basic biological functions (eating, sleeping, mortality*) by which we understand beings to be capable of Being. Oh, and not incidentally, they need to be skilled at fostering and maintaining that thing captured in the title of the documentary: "mechanical love."

[*Paro, despite the fact that it's a machine, is what we could analogically call "mortal." Machines do die, as anyone with any kind of machine knows.]

In Mechanical Love, Paro is placed with an elderly woman in a nursing home named Vera, with the hopes of giving her enough social stimulation to maintain (if not improve) her diminishing cognitive capabilities. The story of Vera and Paro is, quite frankly, heart-wrenching. Vera immediately takes to her new robot companion, and she is obviously happier with Paro than without it. The other patients in her nursing home, as well as the nursing home staff, find Paro annoying and bothersome. They ridicule Vera for treating Paro as if it's real. The staff suspects Vera's attachment to Paro is crazy. But when we see Vera's interactions with her fellow patients in the home, who appear far more "robotic" and "mechanical" (given their compromised social and cognitive faculties) than Vera or even Paro, it's not difficult to surmise why Vera finds her relationship with her robot pet so meaningful. It's what we humans might consider a "social relationship" stripped-down to its bare minimum essentials, but those essentials are undeniably present. Paro is, as it was designed to be, a "therapeutic robot" for Vera and the therapy that it is dispensing is something that uncannily simulates real human social interaction.

So, the question is: what difference does it make whether or not Paro is an actual non-human animal or a robot? Don't our relationships with all "real" domesticated pets function in the same basic way for humans as Paro does? One of the really interesting, and for the most part unexamined, questions raised by Mechanical Love is the extent to which our relationships with domestic (non-human animal) pets says a lot about the liminal space between our relationships with other humans and our relationships with machines. Even as technology gets more and more characterized, defined and understood by the rules of "social" networking, most of us still find it difficult to project onto machines the human characteristics that we easily project onto pets. Still, we forget that our projections onto non-human animal pets are nonetheless projections and, as such, are projected no differently onto non-human animals than they are onto non-human animal-like robots.

But, of course, there is a difference that makes a difference. Non-human animal pets can SUFFER and DIE, while robots/machines can only "break" (or stop working). So, it seems like there must be something more significant that we're capable of investing into our relationships with sentient beings than whatever it is that we invest into our relationship with machines, which we know are not sentient, however much we may pretend otherwise. The interesting phenomenon exhibited in Mechanical Love, in the relationship between Vera and Paro, is that "sentience"-- or, rather, the lack thereof-- is not really a dealbreaker when it comes to what makes for a meaningful, even therapeutic, social relationship. In fact, there are many sentient beings about which the ability to suffer and die is not in the least questionable (like, for example, Vera's companions in the nursing home, or the staff of that home) who nevertheless not only fail to inspire and/or sustain the basic sentimental intuitions necessary for a meaningful relationship, but who may also undermine those same intuitions.

Is Vera's attachment to and love for Paro both meaningful and therapeutic? Undoubtedly so. Is it "crazy"? Arguably not. What does that say about the prospect of "replacing" real sentient beings, like humans and non-human animals, with machines? I don't know.

The fundamentally aleatory nature of our relationships with other human beings (and "domesticated" non-human animals) is, of course, what makes those relationships unique. But it's also what makes them mutable, grossly unpredictable, constitutionally fragile and, as a consequence, quite often extremely painful. As anyone who has a pet-- or a real human friend, for that matter-- knows, the option to "program" one's partner in those relationships such that the possibility of their under-performance might be circumvented is a very attractive option, even if only self-interestedly so. What's interesting about Paro is that Paro remains uncanny, though not because it too-closely approximates the appearance of a human companion or a non-human animal companion, but rather because it too-closely approximates the very companionship we have with human and non-human animals.

Paro approximates those relationships in every way except their imperfect unpredictability... which leads one to wonder after our attachments to those imperfections. In many ways, this particular iteration of the uncanny reminds me of "God's Song" (provocatively subtitled "That's Why I Love Mankind"), penned by Randy Newman and performed best by the late, great Etta James. In that song, Etta James recounts, from the point of view of God, the kind of blind trust with which mankind believes in and depends upon its relationship with God. Here's the song, if you don't know it already:

What Paro is able to accomplish, which no human or non-human animal could, is in the end something truly divine, viz. the ability to constitute itself as a relationship-partner whose "mechanical love" is thoroughly reliable, predictable, determinate and unconditional. Would that it were so with the rest of us imperfect beings!

**NOTE: To those of you who have written to me concerned that you couldn't access this blog recently, I'll just say that I took it down for a few weeks. Why is not important. It's back online now and I'm glad to have you here.**

About Doctor J

I'm a Philosophy professor in and from Memphis, Tennessee. My primary research/teaching focuses on moral and political philosophy, broadly speaking, but I also write about music, film, technology and pop culture here. The title of this blog is taken from a list of rules I pass out to my students each semester. It's Rule Number 1.